Tyler Perry’s . . . Everything

Image details: Premiere of Lionsgate’s "Tyler Perry’s Meet The Browns" – Arrivals served by picapp.com

Ask just about any university-level drama student, and he or she will tell you that you can’t make a living as a playwright these days. Having been a university-level drama student who wrote plays, I happen to know first-hand that very few of us ever expected to get rich and famous.

Fortunately for him, Tyler Perry had a lot more faith in his abilities. While you may be most familiar with him from his role as “Madea” in movies like Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Tyler Perry has built himself quite an empire on his ability to spin a yarn.

He is one of those really inspiring celebrity entrepreneurs because he truly had to persevere in order to succeed. In 1992, he saved up $12,000 so that he could mount a production of his first play, I Know I’ve Been Changed, a musical about adult survivors of child abuse. The show totally tanked, but Perry kept after it. Six years later, the play hit it big at the Atlanta House of Blues and kept going from there.

Today, Tyler Perry is a household name. Much of this is due to the exposure he received by being on Oprah . It’s quite fitting, as it was an Oprah show that first gave him the idea to deal with his feelings about his own childhood abuse, and this is where he got the material for many of his future scripts.

In addition to writing plays, he has also written and produced a number of movies, in addition to producing the television show Tyler Perry’s House of Payne on TBS. In 2006, he even came out with a book called Don’t Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings.

When we think of “moguls” these days, we generally think of real estate or the recording industry. We don’t usually picture some guy sitting at a computer writing.

Remember how I said you won’t get rich and famous as a playwright? Well, Tyler Perry estimates he’s made $50 million dollars from writing and producing plays alone. And, well, he’s famous enough to get mentioned here.